The Bandaids and Backflips of Surface-level Equitable Grading Practices That Avoid Meaningfully Equitable Grading Reform
The education system currently is drowning in well-intentioned grading practices that may be doing more harm than good.
Now, to be clear, a lot of what I’m about to question comes out a place of aiming for more equity in schools, specifically in how grading practices impact students of color, students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, and neurodivergent student.
I am in no way, shape, or form saying that we shouldn’t be critiquing and changing the way we grade to give all students a better shot.
What I am going to say in this post is that the way that many schools (and many grading books centered on equity) are advocating to change grading is really just a way to take shortcuts, make bandaid fixes, and avoid doing the hard work of meaningful grading reform.
The problem with these bandaid fixes is that they make the data look good (more students passing classes, fewer students failing, more students “on track” for graduation), but they often have unintended consequences that reinforce bad habits, communicate false information, and actually conflate behaviors with learning while claiming to do the opposite.
My goal is to break down some of the most common “fixes” pitched to make the grading system more equitable and then to provide an alternate solution that still provides the elements of equity that should be there without the negative side effects of the previous fix.
So, let’s jump in.
The 50% Minimum
The thinking behind this makes sense, and the math can be used to back it up, too. Schools that implement a 50% minimum often talk about a proportional grading scale, and they will explain that it doesn’t make sense to have 60 degrees of an F when all the other grades only have 10. The other piece that is used to justify this position is that a 0 in the grade book carries an undue and overwhelming burden on an overall grade in an averaged system.
I agree with one of these positions and disagree with the other.
I agree that 0s are incredibly unbalanced when we average grades. For example, if you get a 0 out of 100 on one assignment, you must get 95 out of 100 on 18 subsequent assignments just to get an A overall. Even if we just want to talk about a passing grade, getting a 0 on one assignment means you need 95 on 2 other assignments just to get back to passing. A 0 is an unbalanced weight when we are in a system that averages scores over time. In case you’re catching on, there’s a phrase I’m emphasizing here.
I won’t jump into the solution yet because I want to address the other component of a 50% minimum policy, the proportional grading scale. I disagree with the stance that a 50% is the lowest a student should receive because all the grades should have an equal level of degrees. It’s a misunderstanding of what the grade is supposed to signify.
A grade should signify the amount of content the student is proficient in. If a student only knows 25% of the content, they likely are not ready to be successful in future classes. Really, if they know 50% of the content, they likely are not ready for future classes. However, the math with a 50% minimum sends inaccurate messages to that student that they are ready.
Let’s look at the math. If we have a 50% minimum in place, and for the sake of this argument, we have 7 assignments that all represent mastery of one concept in the course, I could not understand an ounce of content from 5 of those assignments, and as long as I get an 85% on the other two, I will be deemed ready for the next course because I have a D overall. However, if we simplify this into the fact that the student is proficient at 2 of 7 standards, this means that the student actually only understands 29% of the content.
Is this serving the student well? Or are we just kicking the can down the road?
This is my concern with the 50% minimum. On its own, it does nothing to address behavioral or learning needs, and in fact, it does the opposite by obscuring the fact that the student needs support and help, either with their productive behaviors, their learning, or both.
What To Do Instead
The 50% minimum exists for a good reason in a bad system. The problem and the reason school adopt it is because the common practice of determining final grades is to average the scores of assignments over the course of the term and then use that average percentage as the final grade for the course (let’s not get into the weeds of weighting and categories and blah, blah, blah - it’s still the same horse just with a saddle instead of bareback).
What do we do instead?
Honestly, this is one of my favorite questions to ask. What would you do if you couldn’t average scores over the course of a term?
This was the question that moved me towards standards-based grading. My approach now is to aim to focus on 7-8 pieces of essential learning (think a deconstructed standard that clearly identifies the learning the student needs to do) in a term, and to provide at least 5 opportunities for students to demonstrate their understanding of that essential learning.
The way this is calculated then is to prioritize recent and consistent evidence from the student to calculate a current score for each piece of essential learning. For example, if a student has five attempts to demonstrate proficiency for a piece of essential learning on a five-point scale, the score may look as follows: 2, 2, 3, 4, 4. (Obviously, it doesn’t always work out this neatly, but clarity is the goal here.) If I was to use to 100-point scale and average these, the student would have a 40%, 40%, 60%, 80%, and 80%, which would average out to a 60%, or barely passing. (Note: in this case, a 50% minimum would get the final score closer to a realistic portrayal of what the student currently knows.)
If a 4 represents proficiency, and the student was able to demonstrate that multiple times at the end of the term, why would I not claim that the student is proficiency and deserves a 4 overall, which we could convert to an 80%.
This means that the student’s grade at the end of the term would be made up of the current overall scores across all the pieces of essential learning they had attempted that term.
This, then, provides students (a) with an opportunity to grow and not be held back by lower scores, (b) to make mistakes productively as part of the learning process, and (c) to still be held accountable for learning all of the required content at a proficient or satisfactory level in order to move on to the next course.
Would you really want to send a student to their next course with an inflated sense of what they know and can do only to be confronted by a harsh reality and increase the likelihood that they devolve into learned helplessness as they realize they don’t have the background knowledge they need to be successful? Or would you rather hold them accountable to learning the content they need to be successful later on in school and life while also creating space for them to make mistakes and learn along the way?
The Logistics of How This Works
Realistically, online grade books are not set up to operate this way. While every grade book will claim to have a standards-based approach, they are so often clunky and confusing, and besides, the default is set to average scores over time when you first log in.
I never used the standards side of my grade book. Instead, I made the regular side do what I wanted. Here’s how I recorded grades in my grade book to reflect this approach. (While I had many iterations of doing this, this was my favorite and most effective approach.)
The only scores in the grade book that counted were the assignments for the pieces of essential learning at the end of the term. I would have one assignment for each piece of essential learning, and each one was out of five points because that was the scale I used. Those eight or so assignments (totaling 40 points) are what made up the student’s entire grade at the end of the term.
However, I do not at all recommend that those are the only things that go into the grade book all term long. Otherwise, it just ends up looking like students are doing nothing in class, and it doesn’t communicate clearly with students or administrators what’s going on. Are they completing their assignments? Are they where we would hope they are in their learning?
I’ll address the first question in a subsequent section about later work and completing assignments, but for the second question about whether or not they are keeping up in their learning, I’ll be honest, it gets a little tricky.
My best solution for this was to have benchmarks timed out in the year. As students attempted the various pieces of essential learning, I would record their progress. I would then set benchmarks where I would say that by week 3, on track performance would mean the student was at a level 2 in each standard. By week 6, on track performance would be a level 3. By week 9, a level 4. And by the end of the term, we would be all the way up to a level 5.
If at week 6 a student was still performing at a level 2, I would manually adjust the student’s grade to just below the threshold my school had in place to have students in our academic supports (for my school that meant the student would be at a 75%). If by week 9 the student was still at a level 2, I would then move the grade down to a 60% to indicate that the student was significantly behind. If the student stayed at a level 2 at the end of the term, I would use the simple numerical calculation for that skill, so at 2 out of 5, the student would receive a 40% for the skill.
Keep in mind, though, that this is not an average of a student’s scores over time. This is done by prioritizing recent and consistent evidence to determine their current level of understanding for that piece of essential learning.
Now, some of you right now are sitting there going, “Wait, what if I game the system and don’t do anything until the end of the term and then suddenly get decent scores? Or what if I just wait to turn in all of my work until the end of the term?”
That’s what we’ll jump into next, but before we do, a final word.
I worry that the 50% minimum is the equivalent of killing students with kindness to avoid doing the hard work of meaningful grading reform and the system end. It is built on good intentions, but those intentions turn out to be a shaky foundation for long-term growth and success.
Now, onto the next well-intentioned bandaid for grading: no late penalties.
No Penalties or Restrictions for Late Work
Another practice gaining popularity as a fix for inequitable grading practices is to simply eliminate any penalty for students turning work in late, and often this is paired with a policy that allows students to turn in work any time after the deadline.
The thinking behind this is that late work penalties will conflate behavioral elements with academic records, so just like the missing assignment 0 in the previous section, a penalty for late work alters the record of learning, albeit less significantly, and doesn’t clearly communicate what it’s supposed to.
Here’s where I will make a confession: for the last two years in my classroom before I switched to my current role, I didn’t accept late work.
Before you grab your torches and pitchforks, I’m not a monster. If a student had a legitimate reason for not having something done on time and had talked to me ahead of time, then I would obviously accept it, and students knew that if they advocated for themselves, I would listen.
They also knew that if they completed their work and showed growth by the end of the term, those missing assignments that were not done on time wouldn’t hurt them. The key: as long as it didn’t become a pattern.
This is where I have concerns with the lack of accountability for deadlines. I’m not going to be one of those people that says, “We have to be mean to them to prepare them for the real world!”(Yes, I know that’s not exactly how they say it, but it’s basically what they mean.) I think that thinking is rubbish because in the real world bosses give you extensions, you can actually file your taxes late, and your friends won’t cast you off a cliff to oblivion because you showed up 15 minutes late to brunch.
However, if I continually am showing up 15, 20, 30 minutes late to brunch with my friends, eventually those invites may stop coming. If I am constantly late on deadlines in my job and demonstrate a habit or pattern, then my boss will likely be less forgiving.
For students, I don’t consider mistakes to be a problem. Had a basketball game and forgot to finish the reading? Not the end of the world, but if my job is to prepare students to be successful down the road, when that mistakes turns into a pattern which cements itself as a habit, that’s where it’s my obligation to step in and do something.
If we allow students to develop a habit of turning work in late, and as a result, not develop the important skills that allow them to manage their time and organize the things that they have to do, we aren’t setting students up to be successful.
Unfortunately, the well-meaning policy of allowing students to turn in late work whenever and with no penalty communicates to them that this type of behavior is acceptable, and thus does nothing to sway students from bad habits.
Additionally, much of my research lately has been about ADHD and the brain. While much of the education world is praising intrinsic motivation, we do a disservice to completely discredit extrinsic motivation for all our students, but especially students with ADHD. The reward pathways in the brain operate differently in an ADHD brain, and the presence of a deadline is something that truly is necessary if we want students with ADHD to succeed in school.
What To Do Instead
Again, the key is to rethink the foundation of how we calculate grades. I could establish that I don’t accept late work because my approach had at least five opportunities for students to demonstrate proficiency in a term. Forgot to finish an assignment? There goes one opportunity. This established a culture of high expectations while still allowing students to make mistakes and be given some grace. However, in a class where all the assignments are averaged over time, not accepting late work or even imposing late penalties could alter the grade enough to make it an inaccurate record of student learning.
The key is to recognize that a grade penalty is a consequence, and frankly, it’s not really even a good one. Yeah, you may get a few students who complete things that they wouldn’t have by rushing to avoid a grade penalty, but it’s not likely to promote any long-term change. In fact, there’s no research (and I’ve done a lot of digging) that proves late penalties have any long-term, positive behavioral outcomes.
A grade penalty is just one option of the possible consequences available for us to use to help students not just avoid negative behaviors, but also to break negative habits and build positive ones.
My favorite approach was to set a threshold of missing assignments. I found 10% of assignments to be a good threshold. If a student crossed that line, indicating that they were starting to form a habit, I would put them on a late work contract for two weeks for a first offense. This involved two elements – one was a behavioral element and one was an academic element.
For the behavioral element, the goal was to identify a behavior that was getting in the way of them being productive during class. This could mean that the behavioral consequence was sitting in a specific seat where they wouldn’t be distracted if socializing was the habit keeping them from being successful, checking in their phone every day if that was a habit distracting them from learning (this option went away when I had all my students check their phones in every day, which I highly recommend), or simply checking in with me at the beginning and end of each class if the element keeping them from engaging in work was more related to social-emotional health. The goal of the behavioral element was to help them change the pattern of behavior was contributing to their missing assignments.
For the academic element, the goal was to help them get back on track with the learning they were missing. Often, the students with lots of missing assignments were also behind academically. While the missing assignments were often the cause and the missed learning was the effect, I also found the inverse to be often true. Students who didn’t know the material would miss assignments because they were too intimidated or frustrated to try. Typically this consequence was an agreement that their grade would drop below the mark to put them in our built-in intervention time, and they would have to meet with me at least once a week after school while the contract was in place to ensure they were staying on track.
Once they had met the requirements of the late work contract, their grade would return to normal, and the hope is that it would have helped create habits that encourage them to be successful in the future. If not, well, that’s why I had a contract for second offenses that was more severe.
The Logistics of How This Works
Whenever I describe how I approach late work, specifically with the contracts, the first thing I hear is, “That sounds like a lot to manage! How do you keep track of all that?!” The answer: I don’t.
Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, but realistically, most of the management work gets put on the student. When a student gets put on the contract, I meet with them to establish the contract, adjust their grade, and then put a mark next to it to remind myself that they are on a late work contract. From that point on, it’s the student’s responsibility.
Here’s the contract I used in my last two years in the classroom. (Feel free to make a copy of it and adapt it for your purposes.)
The student would bring it up to me at the end of every class completed, which would give us a few moments to check in about how they did in class and to see how they were doing overall. Honestly, the relational element of this had just as much of an impact as the nuts and bolts of it.
On the last day of the contract, I would initial the final row, have a conversation with the student, change their grade back to what it was supposed to be with the student there with me, and then save the contract in a folder for later reference. I would often try to contact home to communicate with the caregivers at home.
Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, the reason that this approach works isn’t because of the contract itself, but rather, because of the system the policy exists in. If I was averaging scores over time and every assignment counted, I would have to play the ticky-tack game of ensuring students could check all the boxes all the time. Because I am giving students multiple opportunities and then evaluating their current levels of understanding, I am able to hold students accountable for productive behaviors, not accept late work, and still allow students the opportunity to demonstrate understanding in the long run, all while intentionally addressing habits and patterns counterproductive to the student’s future success.
One last note about this, when I mentioned what gets counted in my online grade book, that doesn’t mean that’s all that’s in there. I will put every assignment in there, weighted at 0 so as to not affect the grade, but then I record assignments as completed or missing. This allows me to communicate home in the moment as to whether or not the student is staying on top of their work without the numbers confusing caregivers.
Now that we’ve talked about the 50% minimum and the late work practices, there’s one final practice to tackle: retakes and redos.
Unlimited Retakes and Redos for Assignments
Too many teachers are buried under mountains of grading already, yet so many schools now are making the claim that if we don’t allow students opportunities to redo assignments or retake assessments, we are doing them a disservice. In that process, they bury their already-overworked teachers in a whole mountain range of grading.
I’ll be honest. As a student, I despised redos, and as a teacher, my perspective towards them was the same. So often I watched students perform poorly on an assessment and then immediately beg for a redo with no learning in between. It was a waste of their time, and as the person who had to review all those redos, it was a waste of my time.
Now, I know many people who have an unlimited redo and retake policy in place also require some steps to be taken prior to a retake in hopes of increasing the learning that happens between attempts. I see value in this, and even tried this approach for a while, too.
However, for anyone who has this approach in place in their classroom, I would encourage you to test this to see if you get the same results I did. What I found is that the retention of material was abysmal from these precursor requirements for retakes. In essence, students were just cramming the material to try to do better on the retake, and then it will fly right out the window after (or sometimes before) their second attempt.
It felt like playing a game, which it really was because it was all just about points like any other game.
Proponents of the unlimited retakes will often say, “If we don’t let them redo it and just move on, we’re telling them that it’s not important.” I understand the thinking here, and I agree with it for the most part, but the piece I would question is, what are we telling them is important? Are we telling them the learning is important, or by asking them to redo the exact same thing over and over, are we telling them that the assignment is what’s most important? More often than not, I found that I was just emphasizing the importance of the assignments and the points it carried, not the learning the student needed to engage in.
So, with all that, and having previously said that I am not in favor of redos and retakes, I will say this: I am a major proponent of multiple and varied opportunities to demonstrate their learning. This phrase and approach to assessment in my classroom helped shift my focus away from assignments and on to learning, and I would argue that it did the same for my students.
Instead of saying, “You’re going to have to go back and redo that to keep your grade up,” I could say, “You have another shot at it coming up. Let’s see how much you can grow before then.”
What To Do Instead
Well, I’m going to sound like a broken record again, but don’t average grades to open up some new possibilities. If, instead of averaging scores over time, we are looking for recent and consistent evidence to calculate a final grade, it becomes less important for a student to do perfectly on every assignment and assessment.
This means that instead of having go backwards, the student can focus on what’s in front of them and growing as opposed to gathering points they dropped behind them. To do this, it requires intentionality about spiraling the curriculum throughout the term to revisit concepts previously addressed (which is good practice on its own) or to scaffold a series of assessments designed to create multiple opportunities within a unit or a combination of both.
For example, when I set up a unit, I make it my goal to identify spots for three traditional assessments, one project-based assessment, and one alternative assessment. To be clear, these are not full tests or multi-day projects. We will still do those, but to make this manageable, the assessments have to be targeted and short enough to turn around quickly. If a student struggles on the first assessment, I can point out their future opportunities to improve.
The Logistics of How This Works
The trickiest part of this approach to multiple opportunities to demonstrate learning is, admittedly, the record keeping. Essentially, you need a place separate from the grade book (or at least the scores that count within the grade book) where you can keep track of student attempts at a piece of essential learning.
For me, my ideal way to do this was with a separate spreadsheet that I used as a grade book. Here’s a quick overview of how I set up my grade book, and a template for you to copy, if you would like. This allowed me to have a separate space to communicate growth with students, to let them make mistakes without it bringing their grade down, and to organize it exactly how I needed. Additionally, by leveraging a tool called Autocrat, I was able to make custom reports for each student with their data.
Now, I know this isn’t the right solution for everyone. There are ways to do this in the grade book. For one, I’ve seen each opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of a piece of essential learning listed in the grade book as an unweighted assignment, and each of these communicated how well a student did on that attempt. The tricky part is that this doesn’t end up being clearly-organized for students. To remedy this, I’ve seen some grade book where each piece of essential learning has its own grade book category. In most grade books, it’s possible to run a report by category, and this would allow you and the students to organize their attempts in each category.
There are, undoubtedly, a variety of other ways you could accomplish the goal of providing students multiple and varied attempts to demonstrate their learning. The key is that students must be able to move on from assignments and assessments on which they struggled without being penalized for that struggle. If we average those scores in with the rest, I would argue that we should be required to allow redos and retakes in order to maintain the accuracy of the grade.
End the Average
If you haven’t picked up on it yet, let me just scream it for a second: AVERAGING GRADES IS THE FOUNDATION OF INEQUITABLE AND INACCURATE GRADING PRACTICES THAT REQUIRE “EQUITY” BANDAIDS WITH UNINTENDED AND OFTEN NEGATIVE SIDE EFFECTS TO FIX.
If that hasn’t sunk in yet, just keep rereading that previous sentence. If it has, you’re probably wondering, where do I start? Here’s my breakdown of what my process looked like (some of this will be similar to what was said previously, but I wanted to lay out the process clearly to be as helpful as possible in the section below - the idea is that the section below could be something you provide to your PLC, your team, your principal, etc., as a way to support meaningful grading change in your classrooms and school).
Analyze Your Standards
This is where everything starts. If you don’t understand your standards well enough to pinpoint exactly what they mean and what they are asking students to do, it will be hard for you to be able to target the essential learning that are the foundation of being able to shift away from averages and focus on student proficiency. My tip for this: start by highlighting the nouns in one color and the verbs in another. It sounds silly, but it ends up being a very clear breakdown of the content and knowledge students need (nouns) and the skills and concepts students should be practicing (verbs). From there, I always took it one more step further to identify in very clear “I can…” statements what the standard is asking students to do. These end up being my pieces of essential learning.
Build Learning Progressions
Learning progressions take the essential learning and break it down into scaffolded steps to help students build content knowledge and understanding towards proficiency, no matter where they are starting at in their learning journey. If a student comes to you with gaps in their learning and you just show them the standard as the goal, they’ll feel just as confused as before they saw the standard. Possible more. A learning progression takes that standard and says, “Here are some possible starting places.” To better explain what a learning progression is, here’s a collection of learning progressions at various grade levels that compare a progression to a rubric for each concept.
The reason learning progressions were so important is that it helped clarify what different levels or scores might mean. Instead of just saying, “You got a 71% on the quiz,” with a learning progression I could say, “You are working on phase 3 of this skill, which means you need to focus on X.” It made the scores students receive actually mean something.
Create a Method of Organizing Assessment Data
Let’s be real: every single online grade book I’ve ever worked with sucks. They aren’t intended to impact learning. That’s not how they were designed. They all were designed as point calculators. That’s it. Points in, grade out, rank the students.
As such, I only do what I’m required to do in the online grading program, and then I have my own spreadsheet that I use to organize student data. Here’s a template of that spreadsheet (free to copy and use), and here’s a video explaining how it works. My issue with the online grade books is that they aren’t organized by learning outcome. This spreadsheet was how I organized my data in a way that made sense and showed trends in learning that students and I could actually use. (Side note: I used Autocrat to create learning reports for students. Here’s a quick video showing how I did that.)
Build Learning-progression Aligned Mastery Checks
While you can just use any old assessment to gather data about student learning and record it in a standards-based format, I found that I had much more success by developing assessment that mirrored the learning progression so that it was really transparent where the student was at in their learning. Here’s an example of one of those assessments, and here’s a blank template you can copy and use.
The way I used these assessments was to have students take them in different blocks. For example, the first time a student would attempt it, I would have them go until their confidence level dropped below a 5. I would give feedback, and then the next time they attempted it, they would continue moving up the phases until their confidence level was below a 5 again, and so on and so on. My goal was to have multiple of these made per unit per skill (sounds like a lot, but you can copy and paste with just a few wording tweaks to make the alternates after the original is done) so that students could have multiple attempts easily. (This wasn’t the only type of assessment I was using. We still had performance-based assessments, projects, etc. These were just much simpler to use and a quicker check of understanding.)
Calculate a Score Using the Most Recent, Consistent, and Convincing Evidence
This is where we finally get to the point where you can calculate scores without averaging. Once the data is organized into clear learning outcomes that show trends over time based on standards-focused assessments where students have multiple attempts, you can simply look at each student’s results and determine where they are currently at with each skill. Over time, if a student could demonstrate a level 4 on repeated performances in their later attempts, their overall skill for the score would be a 4. I didn’t care if they started all the way back at a 1. Why would I be saying, “Well, because you struggled early, your success now is worth less?” That’s absurd. I’m a wildlife photographer who has been fortunate enough to win some contests and display my work in galleries, and in that realm, no one is like, “This is a great shot, but we scrolled back a few years on your Instagram and decided this photo isn’t good enough because your old work sucked.” That’s absurd, but it’s what happens every single day in classrooms.
This way if a student struggled early on, they don’t have to be penalized for that in the long run, but you can truly celebrate their growth and have that be reflected in their grade. This eliminated the need to use a 50% minimum. If a student ended the tern at a 1 out of 5, then they received the 20% score for that skill. However, if a student grew and earned a 4 out 5 at the end, I didn’t need to put any fake 50% scores into the grade book because my method of calculating grades rendered those early low scores moot.
You can also, because you are providing students with multiple opportunities to demonstrate their understanding, hold students accountable to deadlines and not accept late work at all–which was my approach–because missing an assignment doesn’t count against them in the long run. This eliminates the chaos at the end of the term with kids scrambling to turn in a pile of slop that they are using as some sort of point exchange system where no real learning takes place. Now, don’t just get rid of consequences with this. I had a late work contract that would serve as both a consequence and a support for students who began to miss assignments.
Lastly, because I’ve intentionally built in multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate their understanding within the curriculum and my instructional approach, there’s no need for redos and retakes. Didn’t do well on this assessment? We’ve got another attempt coming up, so aim to do better on that one. Not happy with your score? Grow and show that on your next attempt and your old score won’t even matter. No more scheduling a bunch of after-school time for kids to just pick different options on the multiple choice exam while they cross their fingers that they are going to magically score better despite having done no additional learning in between the attempts. Yeah, not how I want to spend my time in grading those.
Final Thoughts
I honestly wasn’t sure I would ever come to the end of this post. I don’t say that like, “Good heavens, I’m so sick of this!” but more like, “I have way too many feelings about this, and this might turn into another book.”
Here’s the reality of the situation: we enact band-aid policies instead of meaningful, long-term change because the latter takes not only the ethereal things like vision and direction, but more importantly, it takes an investment in professional learning that, frankly, most schools don’t care enough to spend. Most unions have negotiated away the professional learning in districts (somewhat of an intentional knock on how typical union leadership approaches this, but also a recognition that professional learning is removed because it often sucks and is ineffective anyways, but that is another post for another time about how to fix that).
The problem is that when we enact these band-aid policies, it actually harms the work of building better grading practices. The side effects pop up and suddenly work ethic drops in students because they recognize they don’t have to do work. Teachers get buried in late work and retakes, and suddenly they begin associating grading reform with unnecessary and ineffective busy work that adds to their already-full plates. Students begin turning in slop for points and forget that the whole point of the assignment in the first place was about learning.
This is where my main issue comes in: most band-aid grading practices have nothing to do with learning, but rather, they are focused on getting students to pass classes and get credits, and they harm students overall in the long run.
Don’t get me wrong. I would love to see all students pass classes and be successful, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the choices I make about grading and assessment, and I would argue that when school prioritize passing classes and earning credits in their grading policies, I can almost guarantee that’s a school where low levels of learning are taking place.
Want to create powerful, meaningful grading practices? Focus on learning. Period.
Want to create complacent, passive, disengaged students who learn less? Focus on band-aid policies.
